Who's he? One of the unsung geniuses of the photographic era, he designed many of their scientific film processes -- including the film that was used on Skylab.
He also made some custom extreme-ultraviolet 70mm film for our sounding rocket flight in the early 1990s. The film was called "649 experimental", and it was fabulous. Very sensitive to extreme-ultraviolet, but practically dead in visible light -- I think its effective ASA rating was about 0.05. Yes, that's 2,000 times less sensitive than normal film. And the resolution was fabulous -- about 2,000 line pairs per millimeter -- that's like 0.25 micron pixels. For our application (a telescope platform that was like a prototype of the solar coronal imager on SOHO), it was the bee's knees. Much higher resolution than any electronic detector, and sensitive and reproducible as all get-out.
Thing was -- Kodak told Al not to make us the film. So he (I'm paraphrasing here) gave them the finger, made our film, and retired.
I figured that was the beginning of the end for them -- it was a symptom that they were beginning to restrict and ultimately ditch the very people who were continuing to make them great. A company that big has a lot of momentum -- but, sure enough, they're spiraling down. Not enough innovation.
... is a forum that talks about specifically this kind of stuff. Being moderated the old-fashioned way, with a benevolently autocratic editor, it has much higher quality posts than the/. average.
I'm happily unaffected by these uber-squabbles, because I don't watch television. Read a book, get outside and go for a hike, go on a date, catch some live music -- why hook yourself onto the steady IV drip of crap coming into your living room?
If I read the article correctly, he was charging $300,000 for labor and such in arrears, which sounds a lot like welshing on a deal to me. When I helped start a web design firm, we poured months and months into our first client's website, so it would look good and we'd get future work elsewhere. Did we undercharge 'em compared to the going market rate? You bet. On the other hand, they took some risk by going with us -- so it comes out a wash.
It's perfectly OK to charge ginormous emounts for your time -- but only if all parties know in advance how much you're charging. That's why I say I wouldn't want to do business with either party -- regardless of whether the guy is being shady, the sheriff's dept. seems to have overreacted and generally abused their position ("Extortion" is generally reserved for threat of physical violence); but Richards didn't exactly play nice, either.
If you RTFA you will see that the web designer hit up the county for $300,000 for three years of serving the web page -- far, far more than the actual costs.
The response of the Sheriff's Dept. is clearly overblown, but this guy was clearly not operating on the level.
To be honest, I wouldn't want to do business with either party.
There are two reasons you might find perl code unreadable: (1) you don't know enough idiom; or (2) the coder was sloppy. My cow orkers used to always complain that perl looked like line noise; then they learned regular expressions.
Perl is the most beautiful language I've had the pleasure of learning. Lots of folks complain that perl must be ugly since it's so easy to write really butt-ugly code in it; but it's also very easy to write mindblowingly powerful, clear code. Enough thought has been put into the language design that you can abuse most aspects of the language and still get what you wanted.
It's easy to forget, when using perl, just how, well, tedious, it is to work in C (let alone C++) or shell or Java or even, yes, Python.
The exegeses so far have been full of fabulous goodies to use and abuse. The main problem, as others have pointed out, is that perl6 is still largely vaporware.
a keyboard and mouse will never replace a fader bank.
So true. Hardwired controls just plain work better than a simulation on screen. On the other hand, for those of us who don't have $100k for a nice studio-quality setup, a $600 system with a crappy soundblaster card has much better quality than even a $5k four-track system would have in the 80s.
Nightmare for equipment brokers, wet dream for us
on
Audacity 1.2.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One of my friends' dad works in the studio-equipment business. As he pointed out, almost the only thing left for them to "sell" is the nice look-and-feel of a full sound board with thousands of manual controls on it. Even traditional-looking soundboards these days are mostly front ends for digital mixers.
Audacity is a case in point -- a small workstation with a few SoundBlaster cards can handle as many tracks as you like and produce sound at least as good as was used to make all that old vinyl, and costs under $1,000. Ultimately, that means anyone who can afford an instrument can probably afford to play at being a sound engineer, with really good postprocessing equipment.
I've been using Audacity for about a year and a half to work my way through my record collection, mp3ifying it. It's great -- I record the records with a SoundBlaster card, depop the recording with some shareware, and noise-gate, adjust levels, and chop up the tracks with Audacity. The results sound better than the original vinyl, since the noise gating gets rid of the surface noise.
My rip of "Layla" off the original Derek and the Dominos vinyl is clear enough that you can hear the master's tape hiss change as each of those famously many mixing tracks gets switched in and out by the recording engineer. I never noticed that when I used to just play the record -- but once the the vinyl surface noise is gated out, it's obvious.
Audacity is good enough that I was able to digitize a friend's old clay '45 of the Clouds
singing "Wyatt Earp" in the late 1950s -- even after the record had
broken in half! I superglued it back together and played it at 33rpm. Of course, there were two loud "pops" for each revolution of the record, since there's no way I could line the grooves up perfectly. In fact, it wouldn't play at 45 -- the bumps would throw the needle out of the groove. But I was able to go in with Audacity and clip out all the pops, then resample to get a full-speed recording. The resulting MP3 accurately reproduces the sound-and-feel of a 1960s era jukebox:-)
My understanding is that it isn't because of a technical issue, it's a snide anticompetitive dig by the incumbent phone companies. They're required by Federal law to allow other companies to use their physical lines, but Qwest (at least) has required competitive companies to use your phone number as a key into the billing/service/whatever databases. That requires you to have a phone number, which requires you to pay Qwest about $20 per month ($15 plus some taxes and fees), which is shady but good for Qwest's bottom line.
Several years ago I managed to get DSL-only service by canceling my phone line after having Speakeasy installed, but I'm told that I just got lucky and the tech who was supposed to physically disconnect me at the local switch didn't.
Earthbrowser isn't a simulation, so I suppose it's quite different from the military's project -- but it is a very nice take on the user interface for such a thing.
I have been wondering what this is all about, having worked at GSFC for some time. I believe that documents (including software) created by NASA cannot be copyrighted, since the U.S. government is not eligible to be a copyright holder under U.S. law (I am not a lawyer). In fact, for code created entirely by civil servants (i.e. NASA-created code) there is a clause thaty says "No copyright is claimed in the United States...", indicating that the work is in that case in the public domain.
The license might be valid for contractor-created code, but (as has been pointed out) the GPL serves pretty well. I (and many, many others) have been creating "NASA software" and distributing it under the GPL, BSD license, Perl Artistic license, and others for years. The main point of the NASA license appears to be to aid in tracking of the software and non-abuse of the NASA name. The former is probably better served by a polite request rather than a license requirement; and the latter appears to be a problem mainly for the paranoid minds of NASA's legal team.
It would be a real shame if NASA contracts and grants started requiring this license on any software developed under grant -- that would fuck up contributions to dozens of open-source projects that benefit mightily from NASA research.
Imagine if every patch a NASA-funded scientist submitted to (say) Perl had a NASA license attached rather than the Artistic License. That would certainly prevent such patches or contributions being included.
I just downloaded the CodeWeavers CrossoverOffice libraries, and holy cow -- it really works. I need to be able to run Microsoft Word occasionally within my organization (Word is, unfortunately, the very best group document development package I've found, largely because of the annotation and change tracking capabilities), and in the past I've either dual-booted or used VMWare to get into M$ Office, but Wine/Codeweavers runs it natively. Apparently, the free Wine will run Office just fine if you use native Losedows DLLs that you copy over from your Losedows installation.
Perhaps they shouldn't try so hart to be human...
on
A New Face For Robotics
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· Score: 4, Informative
Things that look too human appear grotesque and disturbing, unless they're dead-nuts-on. Apparently there's an uncanny valley in parameter space, where things that are close to (but not exactly) human are disturbing and grotesque.
Well, no, "the value of Jesus teaching people to be good to each other" is certainly not dependent on whether he came back from the dead, or even existed. But there's a big difference between appreciating (or even respecting and living by) some or all of his teachings, and being a Christian.
The most broadly accepted definition of a Christian is one who believes and accepts the
Nicene Creed. That includes lots of stuff other than the equivalent of "I appreciate that Jesus (whether or no he actually existed) was a pretty nice guy and said some deep things".
Both Einsteinian and Newtonian relativity allow you to choose your origin, and describe the Universe from that position. General relativity lets you choose any frame you want, though the metric descriptions get rather difficult if you choose poorly. Without excessive gymnastics, you can choose pretty much any inertial frame you want (this includes orbiting frames, like a non-rotating frame of reference that follows the Earth itself) and work from there.
Likewise, Newtonian mechanics also lets you choose any frame you want, but the pseudo-forces get hairy. In Einsteinian relativity, you use a collection of curvatures that describes the geometry of spacetime; in Newtonian physics, you use spooky action at a distance to describe the same forces. That means you have to include an extra pseudoforce (like centrifugal force) on every single object, if you work in a frame that has any Newtonian forces accelerating it at all. For example, if you're describing the solar system you want to choose the center-of-mass frame of the whole thing, which is pretty much the Sun's center-of-mass frame.
In either case, it's much, much easier to work in a frame that follows the most massive thing around. The simpler the math gets, the more explanatory power the theory has, and the more useful the description is. Geocentric reference frames are correct, just not necessarily as useful.
If you convert to (say) Christianity to maximize your "expected return" from life, you're being a hypocrite -- unless you're very different than I am. I don't have a lot of conscious choice about what I believe -- it either happens or not. I do have a conscious choice about how I behave, but to act in contrast to my beliefs is, as they say, to be a hypocrite. No good: hypocrites don't get in to Heaven. In short, for me (and people like me), Pascal's Wager is a canard -- I don't get to choose what I believe, so the dichotomy isn't a real one.
It seems to me that a central tenet of Christianity is the Good News itself -- that an actual guy actually taught a bunch of people how to be good to each other, and actually came back from the dead. That is (at least in principle) a physical, provable proposition, and finding things like the shroud of Turin is a big part of that. Other religions work the same way -- there're a core set of beliefs that hold in the physical world, and that are thought to be supporting evidence for some metaphysical beliefs.
It also seems that this thread is pretty far afield from the topic of cosmology.
Religion and physical cosmology are somewhat orthogonal.
I worked doing mission ops for the SOHO spacecraft for four years. It's a cool place to be -- cutting edge stuff, you're beaming commands daily to a spacecraft a million miles away, yadda yadda. But you rapidly learn that "glamour" is something you can only see from far away. When you're actually doing the stuff, it's just another high stress job in a room with no windows, and debugging and fixing the spacecraft is just what you do every day. I used to have to force myself to look at the big picture and realize what an amazing place I was in.
Now I'm doing pure research and some teaching, in Boulder, CO. This turns out to be closer to my dream job -- more flexible hours and lots of self-directed variety to the tasks. It's certainly not for everyone -- I basically sit around staring at equations, or images, or image-processing software, most of the time -- but every once in a while I get to figure out something nobody's ever known before, and that keeps me going the rest of the year.
Of course, the problem with a self-directed job is that you're always with your boss...:-)
I should get my wife cubic zirconium because it looks the same as a diamond but is much chepaer because it was made with "technology".
No, actually, if you like diamonds and also your pocketbook you should get your wife a "Russian Brilliant" -- an actual diamond, manufactured in Florida with modified Russian technology (in a molten metal solvent under pressure).
The screen from my Sanyo 8100 makes a nice short-range flashlight. I've used it several times for finding my way around dark buildings or hiking through woods on a moonless night. Since it has two screens (a large one and a small one) you get your choice of how badly you want to scrozzle your night vision.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's he? One of the unsung geniuses of the photographic era, he designed many of their scientific film processes -- including the film that was used on Skylab.
He also made some custom extreme-ultraviolet 70mm film for our sounding rocket flight in the early 1990s. The film was called "649 experimental", and it was fabulous. Very sensitive to extreme-ultraviolet, but practically dead in visible light -- I think its effective ASA rating was about 0.05. Yes, that's 2,000 times less sensitive than normal film. And the resolution was fabulous -- about 2,000 line pairs per millimeter -- that's like 0.25 micron pixels. For our application (a telescope platform that was like a prototype of the solar coronal imager on SOHO), it was the bee's knees. Much higher resolution than any electronic detector, and sensitive and reproducible as all get-out.
Thing was -- Kodak told Al not to make us the film. So he (I'm paraphrasing here) gave them the finger, made our film, and retired.
I figured that was the beginning of the end for them -- it was a symptom that they were beginning to restrict and ultimately ditch the very people who were continuing to make them great. A company that big has a lot of momentum -- but, sure enough, they're spiraling down. Not enough innovation.
There was a good discussion of this event some months ago; the current issue has blurbs on topics ranging from computer viruses to aircraft cockpit management.
I'm happily unaffected by these uber-squabbles, because I don't watch television. Read a book, get outside and go for a hike, go on a date, catch some live music -- why hook yourself onto the steady IV drip of crap coming into your living room?
It's perfectly OK to charge ginormous emounts for your time -- but only if all parties know in advance how much you're charging. That's why I say I wouldn't want to do business with either party -- regardless of whether the guy is being shady, the sheriff's dept. seems to have overreacted and generally abused their position ("Extortion" is generally reserved for threat of physical violence); but Richards didn't exactly play nice, either.
The response of the Sheriff's Dept. is clearly overblown, but this guy was clearly not operating on the level.
To be honest, I wouldn't want to do business with either party.
There are two reasons you might find perl code unreadable: (1) you don't know enough idiom; or (2) the coder was sloppy. My cow orkers used to always complain that perl looked like line noise; then they learned regular expressions.
Perl is the most beautiful language I've had the pleasure of learning. Lots of folks complain that perl must be ugly since it's so easy to write really butt-ugly code in it; but it's also very easy to write mindblowingly powerful, clear code. Enough thought has been put into the language design that you can abuse most aspects of the language and still get what you wanted.
It's easy to forget, when using perl, just how, well, tedious, it is to work in C (let alone C++) or shell or Java or even, yes, Python.
The exegeses so far have been full of fabulous goodies to use and abuse. The main problem, as others have pointed out, is that perl6 is still largely vaporware.
So true. Hardwired controls just plain work better than a simulation on screen. On the other hand, for those of us who don't have $100k for a nice studio-quality setup, a $600 system with a crappy soundblaster card has much better quality than even a $5k four-track system would have in the 80s.
Audacity is a case in point -- a small workstation with a few SoundBlaster cards can handle as many tracks as you like and produce sound at least as good as was used to make all that old vinyl, and costs under $1,000. Ultimately, that means anyone who can afford an instrument can probably afford to play at being a sound engineer, with really good postprocessing equipment.
I've been using Audacity for about a year and a half to work my way through my record collection, mp3ifying it. It's great -- I record the records with a SoundBlaster card, depop the recording with some shareware, and noise-gate, adjust levels, and chop up the tracks with Audacity. The results sound better than the original vinyl, since the noise gating gets rid of the surface noise.
My rip of "Layla" off the original Derek and the Dominos vinyl is clear enough that you can hear the master's tape hiss change as each of those famously many mixing tracks gets switched in and out by the recording engineer. I never noticed that when I used to just play the record -- but once the the vinyl surface noise is gated out, it's obvious.
Audacity is good enough that I was able to digitize a friend's old clay '45 of the Clouds singing "Wyatt Earp" in the late 1950s -- even after the record had broken in half! I superglued it back together and played it at 33rpm. Of course, there were two loud "pops" for each revolution of the record, since there's no way I could line the grooves up perfectly. In fact, it wouldn't play at 45 -- the bumps would throw the needle out of the groove. But I was able to go in with Audacity and clip out all the pops, then resample to get a full-speed recording. The resulting MP3 accurately reproduces the sound-and-feel of a 1960s era jukebox :-)
...they're "mid-20s", the previous generation. The new 20s don't have a halo around Jackson.
Feeling with fingernails over Jackson's eyes yields no bump, either.
I get a feeling that IHBT. IWHAND.
Several years ago I managed to get DSL-only service by canceling my phone line after having Speakeasy installed, but I'm told that I just got lucky and the tech who was supposed to physically disconnect me at the local switch didn't.
because I use my land line so little that it took three months for us to notice that our telephone is broken.
(I already commented somewhere else but as usual it was more than 5 minutes after the article got posted, so it's buried).
EarthBrowser is a close analog to Hiro's software, except that it really exists.
Earthbrowser isn't a simulation, so I suppose it's quite different from the military's project -- but it is a very nice take on the user interface for such a thing.
I have been wondering what this is all about, having worked at GSFC for some time. I believe that documents (including software) created by NASA cannot be copyrighted, since the U.S. government is not eligible to be a copyright holder under U.S. law (I am not a lawyer). In fact, for code created entirely by civil servants (i.e. NASA-created code) there is a clause thaty says "No copyright is claimed in the United States...", indicating that the work is in that case in the public domain.
The license might be valid for contractor-created code, but (as has been pointed out) the GPL serves pretty well. I (and many, many others) have been creating "NASA software" and distributing it under the GPL, BSD license, Perl Artistic license, and others for years. The main point of the NASA license appears to be to aid in tracking of the software and non-abuse of the NASA name. The former is probably better served by a polite request rather than a license requirement; and the latter appears to be a problem mainly for the paranoid minds of NASA's legal team.
It would be a real shame if NASA contracts and grants started requiring this license on any software developed under grant -- that would fuck up contributions to dozens of open-source projects that benefit mightily from NASA research.
Imagine if every patch a NASA-funded scientist submitted to (say) Perl had a NASA license attached rather than the Artistic License. That would certainly prevent such patches or contributions being included.
I just downloaded the CodeWeavers CrossoverOffice libraries, and holy cow -- it really works. I need to be able to run Microsoft Word occasionally within my organization (Word is, unfortunately, the very best group document development package I've found, largely because of the annotation and change tracking capabilities), and in the past I've either dual-booted or used VMWare to get into M$ Office, but Wine/Codeweavers runs it natively. Apparently, the free Wine will run Office just fine if you use native Losedows DLLs that you copy over from your Losedows installation.
Things that look too human appear grotesque and disturbing, unless they're dead-nuts-on. Apparently there's an uncanny valley in parameter space, where things that are close to (but not exactly) human are disturbing and grotesque.
The most broadly accepted definition of a Christian is one who believes and accepts the Nicene Creed. That includes lots of stuff other than the equivalent of "I appreciate that Jesus (whether or no he actually existed) was a pretty nice guy and said some deep things".
Likewise, Newtonian mechanics also lets you choose any frame you want, but the pseudo-forces get hairy. In Einsteinian relativity, you use a collection of curvatures that describes the geometry of spacetime; in Newtonian physics, you use spooky action at a distance to describe the same forces. That means you have to include an extra pseudoforce (like centrifugal force) on every single object, if you work in a frame that has any Newtonian forces accelerating it at all. For example, if you're describing the solar system you want to choose the center-of-mass frame of the whole thing, which is pretty much the Sun's center-of-mass frame.
In either case, it's much, much easier to work in a frame that follows the most massive thing around. The simpler the math gets, the more explanatory power the theory has, and the more useful the description is. Geocentric reference frames are correct, just not necessarily as useful.
Jeez, in my day we had to study stars to call ourselves astrophysicists. :-)
It seems to me that a central tenet of Christianity is the Good News itself -- that an actual guy actually taught a bunch of people how to be good to each other, and actually came back from the dead. That is (at least in principle) a physical, provable proposition, and finding things like the shroud of Turin is a big part of that. Other religions work the same way -- there're a core set of beliefs that hold in the physical world, and that are thought to be supporting evidence for some metaphysical beliefs.
It also seems that this thread is pretty far afield from the topic of cosmology. Religion and physical cosmology are somewhat orthogonal.
Now I'm doing pure research and some teaching, in Boulder, CO. This turns out to be closer to my dream job -- more flexible hours and lots of self-directed variety to the tasks. It's certainly not for everyone -- I basically sit around staring at equations, or images, or image-processing software, most of the time -- but every once in a while I get to figure out something nobody's ever known before, and that keeps me going the rest of the year.
Of course, the problem with a self-directed job is that you're always with your boss... :-)
No, actually, if you like diamonds and also your pocketbook you should get your wife a "Russian Brilliant" -- an actual diamond, manufactured in Florida with modified Russian technology (in a molten metal solvent under pressure).
The screen from my Sanyo 8100 makes a nice short-range flashlight. I've used it several times for finding my way around
dark buildings or hiking through woods on a moonless night. Since it has two screens (a large one and a small one) you get your choice of how badly you want to scrozzle your night vision.